Week 1 of Trimester 2 is complete and we are already on the way to creating our first game. Our first brief revolves around emotional and meaningul design. We have to think about something that has impacted our life, either good or bad, and make a short 5 minute game about it.

With this task we were asked what does emotional and meaningful design mean to me and how it could improve my skills as a game designer. I believe that this creating projects with meaningful or emotional design helps create a more relatable character. For example, the soldiers in Call of Duty. Those characters aren't memerable and as a player, you don't have an emotional attachment to them which means anything could happen to them and it wouldn't matter. On the other side of the spectrum you have Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us. Both these characters have emotional backstories that are fed to us throughout the game These meaningful cut scenes and moments help the player connect to the character on an emotional level. When this happens, the player cares about there characters wellbeing more, and helps set up an emotional attachment to them that lasts, even after the game is finished.

This first project is good practise at creating a character with emotional meaning and background. I know that before this I haven't had a meaningful character in anything I have made, but already 1 week into this project my main character feels more human. With this practise, hioefully in future projects I can apply what I have learnt to make a more memorable and meaningful character.

Another thing we were asked was what we want to get out of Studio 2. My answer kind of ties into everything I spoke about previously. The biggest thing I want from Studio is experience. The best way to learn about making games is by actually making games. In the process of making games, you also make mistakes. These mistakes are a good thing, because it lowers the probability of them happening again in the future.